The term Arab is still used colloquially in Egypt and Iraq to distinguish the Bedouin of the surrounding deserts from the native peasants of the great river valleys.
That the Arabs themselves may have used the word from time immemorial to distinguish the Bedouin from the Arabic-speaking townspeople and peasants, and still use it today, confirms the connection with nomadism.
For Muhammad and his contemporaries, the Arabs were desert
Bedouins. In the Qur'an, the term is used only in this sense and never in
reference to the people of Mecca and Medina and other urban areas.
In many western chronicles of the Crusader period, the word
is used only for the Bedouins, while the Muslim populations of the Near East
are called “Saracens”. The 16th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun also
frequently uses the word Arab in this sense.
In summary, the term Arab first appears in the 9th century BC
and is used to describe the Bedouins of the desert of Northern Arabia.
Here and there, settled nomads established cities at a
slightly more advanced level of society. The most important of these was Mecca
in the Hejaz, where each clan still had its own assembly and idol, but the
unity of the clans that made up the city was expressed by the gathering of
idols in a central sacred place containing a common symbol. The four-cornered
building known as the Kaaba was the symbol of this unity in Mecca.
The collection and recording of hadiths took place two or
three generations after the Prophet's death. Over the course of more than a
hundred years, both the possibilities and the reasons for changing the hadith
increased.
The way the Torah stories are told in the Qur'an suggests
that Muhammad acquired his knowledge of the Torah through mediation, possibly
from Jewish and Christian traders and travelers who had been influenced by the
religion of Mithra and pseudo-Christian writers.
The Jews, who were mainly engaged in agriculture and
craftsmanship, were economically and culturally superior to the Arabs and
therefore disliked.
The Medinans had invited Muhammad, not as a messenger of God,
but as a man who would serve them as an arbitrator and have the power to settle
their internal disputes.
Muhammad expected a friendly reception from the Jews; he
thought that because of their belief in a monotheistic religion, they would
accept Islam with a great deal of sympathy and understanding. To placate them,
he adopted a few Jewish customs, such as the Kippur fast and praying in the
direction of Jerusalem. ... When he realized that he could not gain their
support, he abandoned these customs and changed the qiblah from Jerusalem to
Mecca.
Strangers to the concept of political sovereignty, the Arabs
could only establish a state with the help of religion.
The fact that the Messenger of Allah directed the believers
to march against merchant caravans was criticized by European writers. However,
according to the conditions of the time and the Arabs' sense of morality,
raiding caravans was a natural and legitimate business.
The verses in Medina are different from those in Mecca; they
deal with state administration, distribution of booty, etc.
The death of Muhammad threw the young Islamic community into
an administrative crisis. The crisis was overcome by the decisive attitude and
actions of Abu Bakr, Omar and Abu Ubaydah. These three, in a kind of coup
d'état, established Abu Bakr as the sole successor of the Prophet.
By the time of Omar, apart from a small religious tax imposed
on Muslims, all taxes, including jizya and tribute, were imposed on the
non-Muslim subjects of the empire.
The identification of Islam with Arab nationalism is evident
in the way the Arabs themselves treated the new believers. The idea of
non-Arabs becoming Muslims was so unexpected that converts were considered
believers only when they became mawla of one of the Arab tribes. In theory, the
mawali had equal rights with Arabs and were exempt from some taxes, but in
practice the Arabs treated them with superiority and contempt and kept them
away from the material benefits of Islam for a long time.
After Caliph Omar was assassinated by a slave on November 4,
644, Osman B. Affan was elected caliph in his place. Osman was known for his
impotence and cowardice, which was a terrible flaw in the eyes of the Arabs.
Osman's succession as caliph was seen as an achievement of
the oligarchic class of Mecca. ... Osman's administrative weakness and
favoritism towards his relatives caused unrest among the soldiers on the
frontiers.
The ringleaders of the secret plots against Osman's life included
the Meccans Talha and Zubayr, Amr, who had been deposed as governor of Egypt,
and Aisha, the widow of Muhammad.
On June 17, 656, Osman was assassinated and Ali was installed
as caliph. In October 656, at the head of his army, Ali fought the army of Aisha,
Talha and Zubayr. It was the first time in history that a Muslim army was led
and fought by the caliph himself against another Muslim army.
In January 661, Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite named Ibn
Muljam. His son Hasan abandoned the struggle and handed over all his rights to
Mu'awiya.
The Umayyads, chiefs of an invading tribe whose style of
governance depended on the desert element, built their palaces on the desert
frontier where they felt safe.
The Byzantine historian Theophanes refers to Mu'awiya not as
a king or emperor, but as a protosymboulos (first consul).
Under Mu'awiya, the Umayyad caliphate manifested itself more
as a successor to the Sassanid and Byzantine caliphates than as an Arabist one,
maintaining their administrative organization and officials unchanged. Mu'awiya
himself used a Syrian Christian scribe.
Those who were not Arabs but had converted to Islam, and
those who were Arabs by language or origin but for some reason had lost their
membership in the ruling class or had not been able to acquire this right,
constituted the Mawali (singular Mawla). Although theoretically they had equal
rights with Arabs, there was no such equality in the social and economic
spheres. In fact, it was considered very strange for a Mawla to marry an Arab
girl.
Shiism was an opposition, expressed in religious terms, to
the state and the established order, which had adopted Sunni doctrine.
From the beginning, the economy of the Islamic empire was
based on two currencies: The Persian silver dirham was used in the eastern
provinces, and the Byzantine gold dinar (denarus) was used in the western
provinces.
The empire's non-Muslim population, the Dhimmis, were
second-class citizens; they paid higher taxes and were deprived of certain
social rights. At times they were the victims of blatant injustice.
In 945, the Iranian Büveyhids, who had gained independence in
western Iran, invaded Bagdad and swept away the last traces of the caliph's
authority. From then on, the fate of the caliphs remained in the hands of court
ministers, mostly Persian and Turkic, who ruled through their retinue of troops.
The early caliphs were
hesitant about raids by sea. Caliph 'Omar forbade his commanders to go to
places they could not reach by camel.
In 649, Caliph Osman reluctantly
authorized Mu'awiya's expedition against Cyprus.
Under Caliph Hisham
(976-1009), the term “slavs” was used for slaves of Eastern European origin;
later it came to refer to all European slaves in the service of the Andalusian
Umayyads.
Arab civilization was not
brought ready-made by the invading Arabs coming out of the desert; it emerged
after the conquests with the participation of Arab, Persian, Egyptian and many
other peoples. Despite its Islamic stamp, its creators included many
Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
Baybars, a Kipchak Turk,
united Syria and Egypt into one state.
When Napoleon occupied Egypt
at the beginning of the 19th century, he tried to appoint Arabic-speaking
Egyptians to high positions but failed. In the end he had to resort to the
Turks, who knew how to make them obey him.
Under the Ottomans, ambitious individuals, many of them
Turkish governors, launched independence movements whenever they could.
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